Common Core and CS-for-all: What’s our goal

I’m not convinced that the purpose of Common Core is to prepare students for four year universities. Shouldn’t the common core be the minimum standard? This issue is coming up for us at ECEP as we work in South Carolina. In fact, we’re addressing it today in our Computing Education in South Carolina summit. Should everyone be required to take serious CS in high school? Or is it that everyone should have access to serious CS (e.g., preparation for undergrad CS courses), and everyone should know more about CS, but the college-going students are the ones who need the serious CS?

One of the three drafters of the Common Core math standards has publicly admitted that Common Core – which moves Algebra I from 8th to 9th grade and includes little trigonometry, no pre-calculus, and no calculus – is designed to prepare students for non-selective community colleges, not four-year universities. In fact, President Bud Peterson of Georgia Tech has stated that a student cannot go to Tech without having had Algebra I in 8th grade and calculus by senior year. In other words, Common Core won’t get kids into Georgia Tech. This is the “quality” that has so impressed the Fordham lobbyists?

10 years ago I suggested National Curriculum to USA.
I was told that that is agains Federal Laws .
After 8 years America set up Common Core Standards which is the same as national Curriculum with its deficiencies as well .
In Turkey we have National Curriculum minimum education standaRDS FOR hİGH SCHOOLS AS WELL.
But if a student in grade 12 willing to go to science department in a university he gets lots of math and science . Therefore no probloem inm getting into University like Georgia Tech .

I keep hearing people say “private schools are not adopting Common Core” as a way of suggesting that public schools should not either. Most private schools look at the common core and say “why would we want to drop our standards that far?”

I’ve taken a look at a couple aspects of Common Core, doing a little research on each. As usual, attempts at national standards can have good ideas that inspire them, but the way they get interpreted and implemented is another matter entirely, and none of the results that I’ve seen over the years from these efforts have been good. What’s most disappointing is that we are not learning the lesson as a society that the methodology of reform we’re using is flawed.

I’ve done a little research on math in CC. It seems to have some good ideas in it, but I cringe at how they’re being implemented. Instead of teaching advanced concepts such that students can understand them, it confuses them. I can see the effort in it, at a conceptual level, but I can’t give it a “cigar” for success. It elicits a “face palm.”

Another area I’ve looked at is English instruction, and what I’ve seen so far is causing me to back away in horror! It’s not a matter of whether syntax and grammar are being taught well, but what’s being promoted in the name of English literacy. It’s as if English is being philosophically “math-ified,” in the sense of how schools have taught math for decades. It’s being taught as a tool for accomplishing a task, in the pragmatic sense, not for understanding who we are, expressing ourselves, or broadening our ideas.

What’s ironic about the idea that CC does not prepare students for 4-year college work is that high schools were originally called preparatory schools, as in, “preparation for college.” Now we’re looking at the prospect of that goal being abandoned entirely by the public school system. The big question is what are universities going to do about this?